Eftsure Launches in Singapore as Businesses Face Rising Risk From Vendor Payment Fraud

Payment verification company enters Singapore as business email compromise increasingly targets vendor account changes and cross-border payments

Payment verification company Eftsure has launched in Singapore, bringing its payment verification infrastructure to a market where businesses continue to face significant exposure to business email compromise, fraudulent vendor account changes and increasingly sophisticated impersonation scams.

Singapore already has recipient-verification mechanisms within its digital payment infrastructure. PayNow Corporate allows entities to link their Unique Entity Number (UEN) to a Singapore bank or e-wallet account. When making a PayNow transfer using a UEN, the payer can verify the recipient’s registered name before confirming the transaction.  However, corporate finance operations extend beyond a single payment rail. Companies make payments through bank transfers, international payment systems, enterprise resource planning platforms and other workflows involving vendors, employees, beneficiaries and counterparties.

That distinction was highlighted by Andy Thiss, VP and General Manager, APAC at Eftsure, while conversing with AsiaTechDaily.

“Singapore is one of the world’s major treasury and trade hubs, with finance teams managing high-value domestic and cross-border payments across the region. It’s also a market where payment verification is evolving: PayNow gives businesses a way to check the registered name when paying a company through its UEN, but enterprise payment environments are much broader than a single payment rail.

“That makes Singapore a natural next step for Eftsure. We’ve expanded from Australia and New Zealand into the US and Europe, and our verification capabilities now cover more than 190 countries and territories. Singapore gives us a strong base to support finance teams managing payments across Asia-Pacific.”

The distinction matters because the issue is not that Singapore has no mechanisms for checking payment recipients. Rather, large organizations often operate across multiple payment channels and jurisdictions, leaving finance teams to combine different verification processes.

AI adds another layer to payment fraud

The growing use of artificial intelligence is also changing the economics of impersonation. Singapore Police have warned about increasingly sophisticated BEC scenarios involving impersonation, digital manipulation and fabricated communications. In one case reported in May, scammers used impersonation tactics to persuade a Singapore-based company’s CEO to authorize funding, resulting in US$36.3 million being transferred across several accounts. 

For corporate finance teams, the concern is not simply whether an email looks suspicious. AI can make fraudulent instructions more convincing, potentially increasing the burden on employees who must determine whether a payment request and its destination are genuine.

Karthik Manimozhi, Global President, Growth and Markets at Eftsure, said that this is changing the economics of fraud and verification.

“AI has made fraud cheap to produce and truth expensive to verify. CFOs are still trying to keep control of payments while contending with synthetic instructions, human error, and data scattered across disconnected systems. In a financial hub like Singapore, that pressure compounds with every cross-border transaction.

“Manual checks and callbacks were designed for a world where deception took effort and cost money. Trust now has to sit inside the infrastructure itself, validating payment data before money moves, and that is what we provide.

“This is a broader operational challenge than fraud risk alone. Verifying the payee, the amount, and the timing on every payment also catches the errors and duplicate payments that quietly drain cash and margin, which means embedded trust becomes savings the business can measure.”

That expands the potential role of payment verification beyond fraud prevention. Incorrect vendor details, duplicate payments and other payment-data errors can also create financial leakage, particularly across large and complex accounts-payable operations. Eftsure says its platform verifies payment details before funds move and monitors vendor information for changes over time. Its verification process combines business identity checks, anomaly detection and expert analyst review. The company says the same infrastructure can be applied across different outgoing payment processes, including procurement and vendor payments, payroll and insurance claims.

Its verification network spans more than 190 countries and territories, which Eftsure says covers approximately 85% of the world’s banked population. The company supports more than 4,000 organizations and says it safeguards hundreds of billions of dollars in B2B payments each year. The international coverage is particularly relevant to Singapore-based companies with regional supply chains. A finance team headquartered in Singapore may need to validate vendors across several jurisdictions, currencies and banking systems, where local payment conventions and corporate registries differ. Eftsure’s proposition is therefore less about replacing existing payment rails and more about adding a verification layer across the processes surrounding them.

Regulation leaves businesses with a different risk profile

Singapore has strengthened its anti-scam framework in recent years. The Shared Responsibility Framework (SRF) for phishing scams took effect in December 2024, establishing duties for financial institutions and telecommunications companies and setting expectations around compensation where those duties are breached.  The framework is focused on a defined class of phishing scams involving consumers and unauthorized transactions. It therefore does not create a broad reimbursement framework for every form of corporate payment fraud.

For businesses, internal controls around payment authorization, vendor verification and changes to bank-account information remain critical, particularly for transactions outside consumer-oriented payment mechanisms. That environment gives corporate finance teams a different challenge from individual consumers. They need to maintain controls while processing large volumes of legitimate payments, often across multiple markets and payment systems.

Singapore becomes Eftsure’s next expansion market

Eftsure’s Singapore launch follows its expansion from Australia and New Zealand into the United States and Europe. The company launched in Australia in 2014 and combined with French payment verification company Sis ID in 2025, extending its international verification capabilities. Eftsure now operates teams across Australia, the US and France and says Singapore will provide a base for supporting finance teams managing payment networks across Asia-Pacific.

Jon Soldan, CEO of Eftsure, said the expansion is intended to address the challenge finance leaders face in balancing faster payments with stronger governance.

“Finance leaders are expected to move faster, even as they tighten their governance and audit controls. That depends on confidence in the data behind every payment. Eftsure gives organisations a way to continuously monitor payments at scale, helping reduce payment risk while strengthening the controls that support finance, audit and the wider business.”

As Singapore’s businesses continue to operate across increasingly complex regional payment networks, the challenge is shifting from simply securing the payment process to establishing confidence in the destination of the money. BEC attacks show why that distinction matters. A payment can be properly authorized internally and still reach the wrong account. For Eftsure, the Singapore launch is therefore a bet that continuous verification of the payee and payment data can become a core finance control as corporate payments become more cross-border, automated and vulnerable to increasingly convincing forms of impersonation.

Quick Takeaways

• Eftsure has launched in Singapore, expanding its payment verification infrastructure into a major regional treasury and trade hub.
• The launch comes amid continued business email compromise (BEC) targeting corporate payments. Singapore recorded 377 BEC cases and S$35.3 million in losses in 2025.
• In the first months of 2026, at least 66 BEC cases involving requests to change vendor payment accounts resulted in at least S$19 million in losses, according to Singapore Police.
• A recent case saw a Singapore commodity trading company lose US$6.6 million after scammers impersonated a legitimate supplier and redirected a payment to a fraudulent overseas account.
• PayNow Corporate already provides recipient-name verification through UENs, but Eftsure argues that enterprise payment environments extend beyond a single payment rail and include cross-border transfers, vendor payments, payroll and other workflows.
• Eftsure’s platform is designed to continuously verify payment and vendor data, rather than relying solely on one-time onboarding checks.
• Its verification combines business identity checks, anomaly detection and expert analyst review, with coverage spanning more than 190 countries and territories.
• The company says AI is making impersonation and fraudulent payment instructions easier to produce, increasing pressure on finance teams to verify payment data independently.
• Eftsure says verification can also help identify payment errors and duplicate payments, extending the use case beyond fraud prevention.
• The Singapore launch follows Eftsure’s expansion from Australia and New Zealand to the US and Europe, including its 2025 combination with French payment verification company Sis ID.
• Eftsure says it now supports more than 4,000 organizations and safeguards hundreds of billions of dollars in B2B payments annually.
• The broader issue is that corporate payment security is increasingly shifting from verifying whether a transaction is authorized to verifying whether the recipient is actually the intended payee.